zeitgeist

I still can't view the stats page for my blog, which creates a curious feeling of being cut off. Sort of like a performer who can no longer see the audience.

I continue to research my work. If I am not an "insecure talent", in McKee's phrase, who spends all his time in research without ever actually getting down to the creative work, then I am indistinguishable from one.

But you have to go by your own sense of readiness. Only you can really tell when you're ready to write. Often not even you, for in my opinion all too many writers start writing before they're ready, and mediocrity is the result.

Now I'm enmeshed mainly in research on ancient Rome. I've always known I would have to dig into this topic, but had other fish to fry first. So it's not a surprise; I knew this was coming. And I don't want my own work to suffer from the defects I feel exist in many other works that deal with ancient Rome. Too often historical fiction suffers from an over-reliance on superficial details and texture, and does not find the deep feelings and ideas underlying past cultures. These, admittedly, are not easy to find, surfacing in one's mind, I think, only at the end of a long process of research--and not at all if you're not looking for them. But you're looking for a certain feeling of zeitgeist.

I'm now sensing that coming over my own mental horizon, which means I'm getting ready to write again...

researching with a machete

Bit of a late start today, since we both drifted off after the alarm rang at 5:30. A hot night, and as usual now, trouble with staying asleep through it.

Even my basement office feels warm. But a soft cool breath of air comes through the window, along with the far-off sounds of impatiently accelerating motors.

I toil on at the chapter I'm currently numbering 32. No actual prose yet, but the notes documents are ballooning to dozens of pages. I'm not even exactly sure what I'm looking for, but I'll know when I find it. I'm working my way through images, objects, symbols. I'm still looking for my core images; at this late date I still have not found them, and that means I still don't know exactly what my story is about.

When you know exactly what you're writing about, your writing loses its arbitrary quality and takes on purpose. I know the feeling of arbitrariness well; many times I've had the feeling, while writing, that I'm just pulling any old thing out of the air to stick in my scene or my description. This is inevitable when you don't have a clear sense of the meaning of your story--and probably is a universal feature of first drafts. One of the greatest pleasures of doing a second draft is the feeling of confidence in removing material that you now know does not belong. This you can do because you now know what your story is about. The feeling of not really knowing--the feeling I have now, and have had for the past several years--is one of unease and anxiety, at least for me. You can only just keep going along, doing your best.

That said, I find the actual search for key images and ideas fun. Yesterday I was digging into Mount Etna in Sicily and Mount Parnassus in Greece--both said to be the place where the ark of Deucalion (the Greek Noah) came to rest after the Flood. Mount Parnassus is the peak that looms over Delphi with its oracle; it is sacred to Apollo and the Muses, among other things. Because the Muses were said to live there, the name Parnassus has been associated with artistic creation throughout Western history; references to it pop up in the work of artists like Nicolas Poussin and writers like Louisa May Alcott.

I prowl from my computer to my bookshelves, taking out copies of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves and A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot. I read Wikipedia articles, and paste parts of them into my research files. And I type my thoughts as I go, under today's dateline. I read through my earlier notes, highlighting potentially significant or usable ideas I find there.

In short: I'm still at the "machete" stage: cutting my way into the jungle of the unknown. Eventually it will be a highway and the journey will look easy.

But looks can be deceiving...

the writer as soldier

George Orwell likened writing a novel to going through a prolonged illness. Another analogy has just come to me: fighting a war.

The image is not natural for me, since I am a peacenik, convinced that war is only ever a creator of problems, not a solver of them. Indeed to me, violence is a synonym for injustice.

However, the image floated to my mind, so I believe that there must be a connection (trusting my metaphoric powers). In a war, no matter how strong or powerful you are, success is not assured. The great theoretician of war, Carl von Clausewitz, admitted that as soon as you embark on a war, things become unpredictable. Even as you exert yourself to the utmost, you are not the master of your destiny, since so many complex and unknowable factors come into play. To some extent you're always rolling the dice.

Then there's the fact that a war is not just one thing, but a whole--often unexpected--series of campaigns and battles. You might win a brilliant victory in some battle, only to find yourself faced with the same giant task of trying to win the war. In each battle, victory is necessary but not sufficient. You've got to keep slogging on after it's over, whether you win or lose this one engagement.

And there's no fixed term. Unlike a sporting event, in which, even if things are going miserably, you can take solace in the knowledge that the final whistle will eventually blow and you can go home, a war is of no fixed duration. History is dotted with struggles with names like The Hundred Years' War. How many would be able to go through with a war if they knew that that would be its eventual title? Depressing.

Then there's the fact that everyone always goes to war certain of their own victory. But of course, the result is often defeat. Even the eventual "winner" can take a heckuva a pounding on the way. Indeed, most victories are more or less Pyrrhic, with the survivors trying to take comfort in the idea that their loved ones' deaths were justified by rescuing some abstract noun or other ("freedom", "democracy"). For people burying family members, or merely taking delivery of a dog-tag at the front door, it's cold comfort.

Writing a novel, of course, is not such serious business. But on a personal, individual scale, it brings comparable feelings into play. In a certain sense you're picking a fight with something that fights back, and success, no matter how you define it, is far from assured. And no matter how well any one battle goes--and often they don't go well--you know there are a large number of them still remaining. You strategize and discipline yourself. You need courage and have to be prepared for pain--perhaps lots of it. And, win or lose, you'll be shedding tears before it's over.

Right: on with the fight.

the Muse and I

All right. If this blog is supposed to be about the process of writing this work, then what can I say about where I'm at right now?

I'm going through the process that has evolved, seemingly of itself, in the long course of working on this project. I'm in the midst of trying to work out the chapter that, for now, I'm numbering 32. (My chapter numbers--and the number of chapters--will change in the next draft; this is one of the few things I'm sure of.) The notes document now runs to 32 pages as well.

The first and best metaphor that springs to mind is that of digging. I ask myself questions and try to come up with answers. Whether the questions are really useful or germane--never mind the answers--is not clear. They are just what come to mind in my effort to discover where I'm going.

I have a rough idea of where I'm supposed to go--that's laid out in my outline, the blueprint I developed in the earlier, happier days of 2002-03. But sometimes that outline is vague (such a huge job), and often it's hard to engineer the events that will bring about the steps required in the outline. Then again, sometimes the outline itself needs to be changed: I come up with actual new ideas for how to turn my story. In a way, that's the most exciting part of this first-draft process, even as it creates anxiety that my whole story might shift out of its current form and turn into something else--something that will take yet more years of my life to write.

Ah, anxiety, my old friend. Many fears attend working on a project like this (all right, on this project--there are no others "like" this). The greatest fear is of not finishing it, which might happen for any of a number of reasons, the most pleasant of which would be my own death. Other reasons would be physical or mental incapacity of one kind or another, including the "incapacity" of losing inspiration.

And now it dawns on me that this is the real reason that epic writers of the past have invoked the Muse at the beginning of their works. Not for quality of inspiration, even though that is how they couch their terms: "Help me, O Muse, find adequate words..." But for quantity: "Help me, O Muse, find the creative stamina to reach the end of this work..." I can't speak for other epic writers, but that's what this one needs. And for this I really do pray. And I believe that the Muse so far is helping me. Through the umbilicus that attaches us she sends the inspiration that nourishes me through these long seasons of effort.

For this I thank her. Oh yes indeed. Thank you, O Muse. Please don't let me down. I will keep at it and offer the result, good bad or indifferent, to you. It is yours before it is anyone else's.

the solitude of uniqueness

Again I find myself staring at this screen, wondering what to write about.

What's my problem? I'm a writer, aren't I?

I might be "a" writer, but I am coming to feel that what I'm working on is something that is outside the bounds of normality, even by writing's standards. I feel a bit like someone who's brought a plesiosaur to a pet show. What events do I enter it in? What category to I put it in? How do I fill out my entry card? There is a sense of the grotesque, and a general feeling of what's he doing here? That my very presence, in some sense, is spoiling everyone's fun.

No, of course I'm not spoiling anyone's fun. But gradually I feel myself taking on more qualities of alienation: that my experience and my effort are taking me beyond the bounds of what other people can really grasp.

I think about the survivors of the true-life story that was the basis for Melville's novel Moby-Dick. In a rare display of fury, a sperm whale really did turn on a whaling ship in the South Pacific and stave in its hull, sending it to the bottom. The surviving crew were left in two lifeboats more than 1,000 miles from land. They became separated, and one boat was never heard from again. The other boat eventually beached on South America with a few survivors, but only after an excruciating ordeal that involved being baked alive under the sun, the madness induced by drinking sea-water, and cannibalism.

Who could ever really understand the extremity of what those men went through?

The alienation of an extreme experience is perhaps just a metaphor for life. Naked and alone we arrive on planet Earth for our journey; naked and alone we depart. Alienation, perhaps, is our basic condition, and all of our societies, our pet shows, are just so many efforts to cheer ourselves up.

No, I'm not depressed. But I am feeling a new and greater sense of the solitude of uniqueness.

nonacademics

These days my "writing" consists of reading and typing the resulting notes. My method I suppose is not much different from what it would be if I were writing a work of nonfiction: reading, highlighting, typing. Occasionally my research sparks ideas for my story, and I type these in suitable story-related documents. I shift back and forth between reading my research works and musing on their implications for my story. I can only say that to me, this feels productive.

I follow specific lines of investigation. For a number of reasons my research right now has led me to look into the mythology surrounding Mount Lycaon in Arcadia--the place where the god Pan was allegedly born, where Zeus allegedly turned a king into the first werewolf, and where the Greek version of the Flood originated. My text right now is The White Goddess by Robert Graves, a treasure-house of deeply researched and interconnected mythological lore.

Taking a glance at the reviews on Amazon.com, I see that The White Goddess has become somewhat uncool--although it still has its passionate fans. Even those fans seem to feel the need to make excuses for what they fear is its political incorrectness and lack of concurrence with current scholarship.

Personally, I would never dare to presume to make excuses for a man of such evident and outstanding genius. True, he's an outlier: a poet, a maverick. He was not a professional academic--and was proud of that fact. He spent only a brief interval of his life teaching at a university in, I believe, Egypt; the rest of his life he spent as a professional writer.

Bravo, I say.

Graves had access to resources that academics lack. Not only was he fully conversant with ancient Greek and Latin, he had read, apparently, every surviving classical work in its original language up to the Byzantine era. He had tremendous powers of deduction and inference, as well as a profound knowledge of the natural, climatic, and folkloric aspects of Europe and especially the Mediterranean world.

But beyond these things he had a conviction in his vocation as a poet, which placed him in a fraternity not with academics, but with poets of all ages--including the poets responsible for the myths of the ancient world. Graves trusted his own poetic instincts to tell him how the poets of old connected their images and their meanings. You can't annotate that with a footnote. The plausibility or authenticity of the connection lies in its intrinsic power--in whether it awakens something in the reader or listener.

Yes, I can understand how, for academics, Graves constitutes a kind of no-go zone. But academics don't have a monopoly on knowledge, still less on history, culture, or myth. Graves was writing, first of all, for fellow poets: those entrusted with making use of the powerful images and their interconnections. And it is in that role that I approach his work.

And as I reread The White Goddess, I too am glad that I'm not an academic.

quiet life

It's hard to describe the writing process as I'm now practicing it. There is a feeling of tunneling in, digging into the ideas and characters that I've got, searching for a nucleus, for the linkages.

Research is continuous. In some ways I feel that a work of fiction or drama is as much a matter of research as any work of nonfiction, or even of science. And, in many ways, the more fanciful your story, the more its underlying network of consistent relationships, of rules, needs to be solid and worked out. Somewhere in the mysterious chemistry of fact and fancy emerges the special cocktail of familiarity and strangeness that is a story. A good story, anyway.

Summer heat is upon us. Right now (7:26 a.m.) the green central area between our building and the buildings next door is still in shade. The sun strikes the lane beyond the low canyon between our buildings, and the sky is clear blue over the gray expanse of the long roof across the lane. It is quiet except for the whir of two fans in my computer.

I wanted a quiet life in which to think and write, and, outwardly, I've got it.

laboring in freedom

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Thus spake Einstein. (I forget now where I found that quote; I copied it into a document I have for recording quotes.) I've mentioned it before, but it's one that I keep returning to in my mind.

I realize that I place tremendous importance on this idea of laboring in freedom. Indeed, I've bet my whole life on it.

What it means to me is that one' s work is generated spontaneously from within, and not in response to outward inducements from others. Not as an assignment given by someone else, not in response to the supposed cravings of the "market", not in order to gain the approval of society or any subset of it. Instead, one becomes inspired by one's own relationship with something--an idea, a possibility--and, with the energy of this inspiration, which is the same thing as enthusiasm, one works to realize the inspiration.

This can never be a practical decision. By its nature it is the opposite of practical: it is not a means to realize some near-term worldly or economic end. For those of us who have a worldly, practical nature, this disconnect produces anxiety.

At least, that's how I feel. The worldly part of me--which is not a small part--looks on with a kind of horrified fascination at the "enthusiastic" or creative part of me, the part that is devoted to an inspired task and doesn't give a damn about anything else. The worldly part finds itself in the position of having to think of ways to sustain the inspired part, which doesn't seem to care or even notice whether it's being sustained or not.

"When's this thing going to be done?" Worldly Part says.

"Huh?" says Inspired Part, not looking up.

In the earlier part of my adulthood, the worldly part of myself tried to be in control. It saw itself as the manager of the whole system, and the inspired part as subordinate. Creativity was to be put in the service of worldly aims.

That was the wrong way around. Whatever feelings of confidence or security may have come from it were illusory. I may not have felt direct anxiety over my creative life--but I should have. (Indeed, I did have a lot of anxiety, and I reckon that my creative life was possibly one of its chief bases.)

Now I do have worldly anxiety: I worry about my long labor at such a vast creative project. Like the audience in a good movie, I wonder, "How's this going to turn out?"

I don't know. It's not a script I've written. I'm playing my part, and hoping for the best.

the reality of writing

After all my fine talk, yesterday was a naked confrontation with the problem of work-avoidance.

The aspect of writing that seems like it should be the most creative and the most fun, coming up with original ideas through the free play of imagination, is in fact the most daunting part of the job, at least in my opinion. The work is most approachable when it is at its most mechanical. I almost never put off the most mechanical parts of the job, like typing up my research notes. Indeed, I enjoy that part. I start my "creative" day by reviewing the previous day's writing notes, and highlighting possible "keeper" ideas--again, fairly mechanical and easy, and not something I'm inclined to avoid.

But then we arrive at the day's problems: how to push my story forward? This is where the rubber meets the road, and, by and large, it is the place I am most afraid and disinclined to be.

There's nothing for it: here the writer is on the spot. This is where the writer produces. The insertion-point winks slowly on the screen, ready, waiting. It's supposed to be moving forward, with a string of new words trailing after it.

Yes, this is a corny complaint of writers through the ages. But it's real enough. When the writing matters to you, it becomes very difficult. In this respect it is like thinking through your own life-problems. For we all have those: "What should I do about my alcoholic brother?" "My wife can't forgive me for not getting the vice-presidency; what should I do about that?" "I'm not achieving what I wanted to in life; what should I do?"

Questions that seem too hard we tend to simply avoid, push aside--at least, I do. This is not a wholesome strategy; indeed, it's not any strategy. It's what happens when you simply try to dodge the immediate and impending feeling of failure. In writing, you stare at that insertion-point and nothing comes, perhaps. Or only the same stale ideas that you've typed there before. You get to experience yourself in the act of failing--surely no one's favorite experience.

On the other hand, the failure-point is also the success-point. Whatever magic there is in writing, this is where it happens. New ideas do come, they do blossom in the head--familiar words are strung together, and something new appears. It's just that, on any given occasion, you don't know what you're going to get. Or, rather, you have a good idea that, if it's like most such occasions, it will not be very rewarding. The gold, like real gold, is contained in a mass of native rock that has to be dug. And no matter how much you like gold, some days--many, most--you don't feel like digging.

So yesterday I arranged some notes, did some more research reading--I tried to be productive at those lesser, more doable activities, pushing my project forward in an administrative sense, at least.

This is the reality of writing. There's that winking insertion-point right now: ready, waiting, not judging me but simply doing its job. Yes. Will I do mine?

Rumpelstiltskin the writer

I regarded yesterday as a small victory. My output was slight--but I had an output. When I came down to my office after breakfast, it was looking bad: another day of project-avoidance.

I fiddled and footled with other things, painfully aware of my procrastination. But eventually I coaxed myself into opening up my working files. Unhappily and with distaste I made myself look at my draft in progress, the chapter I've numbered 31(b), growing slowly as a yew-tree. Where does it need to go? Has it started the right way?

The ice cracked when a specific question occurred to me. It was a question about how certain minor characters, holders of a specific job-function, would behave at a particular moment. What was their job? The smallness and specificness of this question was what enabled me to get going. I could go to my Notes document and type my thoughts, such as they were. Would they lay their hands on my character, or not?

This caused me to look at my story-world more closely, to go in and make a decision, or two or three related decisions--small ones. This is the difficulty of writing, I think: decision-making. One of the biggest obstacles to writing is vagueness: an indefiniteness about the subject. If your information is too scanty, you've got nothing to write. If you force yourself to write when you don't have enough information, you become an author of cliches.

In fiction-writing, developing the details of what to write takes effort. Those details have to be discovered, imagined, decided on. Ideally, you need enough information so that you can pick and choose: you can make creative choices.

This is partly a matter of technical research, and partly a matter of active imagination. For the writing to be good, the fictional world must become as definite and specific as the real world--the world of memories, for example. It's like constructing sets for theater or the movies: the set needs to be complete before you can film your scene there. In filmmaking there's a document called the call-sheet that specifies all the people and equipment that need to be on the set for the filming of that day's scenes: actors, hair stylists, special camera gear, automobiles, and so on. Someone has to work out all those details and figure out what's needed, and when.

Writing fiction is the mental equivalent of that. The "set" is in one's head--one's imagination. But it too needs to be furnished through a process. It requires education, research, imagination, and decision-making. I believe that the power of the finished work, the amount of interest and pleasure it can evoke in a reader, depends on how much of this type of effort has gone into it.

All that material furnishes the straw which Rumpelstiltskin the writer spins into gold.

beachcombing

I seem to be back to full intestinal health--praise be.

This morning I continue to type notes from different books--The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth (not so new now; I received it as a present in about 1973), Anatomy of Criticism, The White Goddess. Searching, typing--what am I doing?

I'm not really sure. I'm looking for something, but what? Can I even say?

The first word that jumps to mind is unity. I'm looking for unity. A work of art is, after all, one thing--a unit. Everything in it must belong. How do you decide what belongs? It's partly intuitive, partly rational, or so I find. I think about John Constable, fussily reworking his paintings. I believe that in his masterpiece, The Hay Wain, he painted the dog (walking along the near shore of the pond) in and out of the picture more than once. Not just the dog, but other elements too. Constable had a hard time deciding what belonged in a picture.

A work of art, such as a novel, is like a landscape: it is a visible thing whose features are supported by a host of invisible factors that stretch out into the whole universe. Its richness and uniqueness and beauty derive from the specific conjunction of those factors.

I'm looking for things I can use. I'm searching the most likely places, trying to let intuition guide me as much as possible. For the artist does not create ex nihilo, but assembles things that he or she finds. Creation is a matter of combination. To have a range of things to combine, you need to go hunting.

So I'm hunting. It's almost like beachcombing, or like the old guy I saw in the Hinnom Valley outside the walls of old Jerusalem in 1981, walking slowly down the slope with a metal detector, looking for coins or other bits of treasure not yet found.

Yes, after all these years, still assembling my construction materials.

tunneling from both ends

Still at it. That is, still working my way through the difficulties of my story.

I have spent a huge amount of time (even by my own slow standards) fiddling with this part. But experience has taught me that there's no use in pushing on with a piece of writing if you're not clear on what you're doing. That is tantamount to trying to fix a problem using the wrong tools.

From the point of view of this blog, one difficulty is in how to describe this slow, searching process--how to make it seem interesting, or at least comprehensible.

An image that springs to mind is that of building a tunnel. Often tunnels are built by digging from opposite sides of the mountain and trying to meet in the middle. This is no doubt done in order to halve the construction time by putting two full excavation crews to work at once.

In a similar way, I build story by digging from "both ends": that is, by imagining the result or end-state I want to reach, and also by imagining the motives and actions of the characters en route to that end-state. Changes to the end-state mean making changes to those motives and actions. Changes of motive and action lead to different end-states.

"End-state" means not just the ending of the story as a whole, but also the end of each segment: each chapter, each scene. In a work that has been planned, outlined, each of these will have its story purpose, and therefore the end-state that needs to be reached. But getting characters to go there can be difficult.

Why? After all, the characters just do what I tell them, don't they? Why not just send them to the destination and get the whole thing written quickly?

It's about believability. Stories in which characters move smoothly as though on rails to obviously contrived end-states smack of author convenience, the evidence of which is a feeling of bending the rules of reality every which way to get there. I've talked about these things before. These are those scenes in which the hero's fetters are done up poorly, enabling him to wriggle free; or the building has large ventilation-ducts suitable for crawling through; and so on. There's a sense of "let's just get through this part so we can get to the exciting stuff ahead".

Contrivances like these ruin my enjoyment of a story. I don't mind a few--every story needs some help at times to keep going--but as they pile up, I sense writer laziness and a work written in the belief that credibility doesn't matter, or, worse, that the audience is too dumb to notice or care.

If your hero is tied up, and you need him out of his bonds, how do you get him out? If you resort to the old "luckily, they weren't tied up very well" trick, then you're lazy in my opinion. You don't care about your story very much.

How might I handle it? If I don't have any creative way of untying those knots, I might simply have the hero struggle with them, and not succeed in untying them. In story terms, that's what's known as a barrier: the hero tries something, and it doesn't work. A rule of thumb in storytelling is: always make things tougher for the hero than he expects. (It's OK to surprise him on the upside sometimes--especially when he's expecting things to be very difficult.) Now, whatever he does next, he has to do it tied up. He'll have to get creative with a future opportunity.

Or I might try to avoid having him tied up. Why create problems for oneself? Don't use the old "tying up" formula: use something else. Maybe he escapes--and, sprinting free, triggers an old leg-hold trap in the woods, and is caught that way...

If I decided he had to be tied up after all, then I would have to examine the details of his situation: tied up how? Where? By whom? I'd have to visit the character(s) doing the tying up: how motivated are they? How knowledgeable? What materials do they have? How much time? What is their attitude to what they're doing? By looking at how the bad guy approaches the task, I'm digging my tunnel from the front: how would I do the job, if I were he?

In doing this, I might hit on an idea for how the hero will escape. Once I have this, I need to start designing my scene so as to make this work. That's digging my tunnel from the back.

I find I need to shift from front to back, back to front, again and again, working through a story problem in steps. Maybe my idea is to have the bad guy leave behind a tool that the hero will use. That too is a story convenience, of course--unless the hero makes it happen. Hero might see bad guy set down the tool for a moment, then hit on the strategy of trying to "make" him forget it. Now the escape task shifts to a new arena: how the hero tries to manipulate the bad guy's attention, even as he is being tied up. A story subproblem opens up, with its own features--another little tunnel within the tunnel.

A story is not complete until every one of those problems and subproblems has been solved to my skeptical satisfaction. I need to believe that every single character is always acting in some way that I myself might act in the same circumstances. This requires imaginative effort, and not being satisfied with easy answers--things I've seen before.

It's hard. But when you do the work, it really pays off. If you want to create a really good story, set yourself and your characters tough problems, then think hard about how to solve them. If you keep at it, the answers do come.

Just as in civil engineering, in writing this method of tunneling from both ends speeds things up tremendously--even if it doesn't feel fast.

style? forget it

A couple of days ago I was talking with my mother about writing. She was saying that one of the things she frets about while writing is how to say something--the issue of style.

I used to concern myself quite a lot with style, but I don't anymore. Or: not much, anyway. Now I believe that if, as a writer, you're focusing on style, you're directing attention at the wrong thing. It's a waste of time for at least two reasons:

1) the most important effects of creative writing are unrelated to style;

2) any style that is self-consciously "used" comes across as affected, which places an obstacle between the reader and the content of the work.

Now I associate "chosen" styles with commercial writing. I think back to writing for hire that I've done, such as a couple of small pieces for Vancouver magazine back in the 1980s. I wrote them in the snappy, breezy style that was the tone of that section of the magazine--and collected my (small) checks. It was perfectly good work, and I myself enjoyed reading that part of the magazine. But if I set out to write a novel in that style, it would be self-conscious and phony exercise (and possibly a work of "chick lit").

I'm no more happy when "serious" writers fool around with their writing style. To me, the work of, say, Ernest Hemingway comes across as affected. Maybe it wasn't; maybe that was his natural and spontaneous way of writing. But I don't think so. It reads, to me, like the work of someone trying to write a "special way" for effect--to impress, in some way.

I'm afraid I can't even exempt my literary idol, James Joyce. Much of Ulysses is a stylistic tour de force. But to the extent that it is such, I'm afraid it is not very powerful--not to me. Such tricks rely on the reader's education in understanding some abstract point or joke being made by the writer. There is then, presumably, a burst of detached, ironic amusement, or some such. Compared to what literature is capable of, this is an empty and arid experience.

I hold much more with E. B. White, who said that style is not something that a writer can really contrive; it is a natural expression of the totality of the writer's being. Your style arises from the sum of your personality, experience, and education. At the moment of writing, you can't change those things; they are what they are, as distinctive as your fingerprint. It's almost impossible to change--and why would you want to?

An excessive concern with style shows that the writer is either ignoring or taking for granted his subject-matter. But this is a bad idea. The first duty of the writer is to have something worthwhile to say. And the more important your subject, the less important the issue of style is. If you've witnessed a genocide and want to write about it, it would be foolish and narcissistic to fuss over your literary style, aiming for precious effects. You've got bigger fish to fry.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, devotes maybe 3 or 4 pages to "diction"--roughly the equivalent of style as I'm using the term here. The rest of the 40-odd pages he devotes to content: your story. That accords with the balance I would propose: spend 90% of your effort on story, or what you're writing, and 10% on style, or how you write it. No: make that 95% and 5%.

The tip I offered Mom was to write the way she might write down a vivid and important dream when pressed for time. If you've only got 10 minutes to write down your dream, how do you attack it? You're not sweating over the fine points of style; you've got something to say, and you've got to get it down--now. That way, you'll rely on your natural style, whatever it is. For better or for worse, it will be you.

I might boil it down thus: don't be clever; be honest and accurate.

writing with guns to head

My approach to writing is inseparable from my quest for beliefs.

Yesterday, while keying notes from Story by Robert McKee, I came across his view on what the function of art--written art--is in society (slightly compressed):

I believe we have no responsibility to cure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner being. We have only one responsibility: to tell the truth. Therefore, study your Story Climax and extract from it your Controlling Idea. But before you take another step, ask yourself: Is this the truth? Do I believe in the meaning of my story? If the answer is no, toss it and start again. If yes, do everything possible to get your work into the world. In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

To tell the truth. OK, good. What is the truth?

In the first place, from the artist's point of view, it's honesty: telling it like it is. Reporting the actuality of one's experience rather than an idealization of it, or what the community agrees it is or should be. What's it really like to get married? to get fired? There are conventional ideas around the experience of these things, but the writer should have no truck with those. What do you really think and feel? That is what the writer should be writing.

You might call that subjective truth: honesty about one's own subjective experience. But there's also objective truth: the world of facts outside oneself. The storyteller must also be honest and proficient here. That means taking the trouble to find out how things are.

If you want to write about firemen, you need to know their world. What are their job functions? How do they spend their day? How are they similar to each other? How do they differ from each other? You'll need to know these and many other things before you can write something worth reading about firemen. If all you know about firemen is that they're tall, strong, brave, and like rescuing people, then you're simply regurgitating a cliche--a conventional idea of what a fireman is. And as McKee says, what's wrong with creative writing can generally be summed up in one word: cliches.

The only way to prevent cliches is to acquire knowledge: actual, objective knowledge of what you're writing about. Each sentence should be telling the reader something he or she didn't know before--something he or she has not already heard elsewhere. Each sentence should contain some element of surprise. With each sentence you learn something new. That's what keeps a reader interested.

Yes, often that "something new" is a matter not of direct knowledge but of imaginative innovation: the various quirks of Harry Potter's world, for instance. But even there the imaginings are based in fact, and in a direct experience of the sensual world and the people in it.

And for those of us not writing fantasy, we have to dig deeper into our world for surprises.

In my case, I'm not satisfied merely to dig into the world of facts; I also dig into the world of theories: people's beliefs and the dimly-felt realities to which they refer. My "story research" is also a kind of scientific or scholarly or philosophical research. I'm not sure this is the "right" way to write, whether it will add anything or make for a better end product, but it seems to be the only way that I can do it and feel that I'm giving it my all. If I did not do this, I would not feel that I've tried everything in my quest to tell the best, the truest, story that I can.

It's a fascinating journey, an interesting way to work--but it's time-consuming. That in itself is not really a problem except for two things, in approximate order of importance: 1) death; 2) revenue. I could croak before I'm finished, and I could go broke and be derailed from my work by having to scare up the wherewithal to live.

Both of those things have worried me from time to time. But I can't let them scare me off my project, or intimidate me into changing my approach. This is a great experiment in my approach--the approach I would use if not coerced by any outside influence. With Death and Revenue holding guns to my head, I have to coolly keep my nerve--and keep working.

up on blocks

Kimmie took yesterday off to ice gingerbread cookies. A welcome respite from the morning alarm, and a bit of a change of pace. The blog-post got squeezed out.

I continue to work on my story. By that I mean, work on the story itself--the succession of "what happens".

This is anxiety-inducing. Why? Because while I tinker, fiddle, and imagine with a bunch of conversational notes to myself, and shift around entries in a list of bullet-points, the book itself, the prose, sits idle, like a car up on blocks. In this case the whole drivetrain has been pulled, and the mechanics going over it seem to be taking their time.

Some part of me is no different from the old-time Hollywood mogul Jack Warner, reputed to have walked past the writers' offices on the studio lot to make sure he heard the clack of typewriters. Lacking any idea of how scripts are actually written, he was merely expressing his ignorance, powerlessness, and superstition. I know a lot more about creative writing than Jack Warner did, but even I recognize that a text that remains frozen at the same word-count week after week is making no visible display of progress.

Hence the anxiety. Nothing beats the feeling of sailing ahead with prose that you know is good, that you know is telling your story, and doing so in close to the best possible way. At least, I assume that nothing beats that feeling. Not having actually experienced it, I'm kind of guessing.

creating by association

Yesterday was what I would call a good writing day. I focused and kept at it for, well, a certain length of time. I worked in my Notes document, following the heuristic approach of asking myself questions and then attempting to answer them.

One thought leads to another. The interesting thing about this is that, remarkably quickly, you move from the self-evident to the unexpected--or anyway to the not-so-obvious. One fact leads to another, in a chain of connection. And those other facts can be charged with new significance.

Harold Bloom makes the point that a large part of Shakespeare's genius was that he used soliloquies to show how a character comes to new realizations by hearing himself put something into words. While this isn't exactly what Bloom meant, I think about Hamlet's famous line, "To sleep, perchance to dream...", in which, in using the metaphor of sleep to describe death (his own contemplated suicide), he is led on to the connected idea of dream--that consciousness lives on even when the body is "dead".

Every idea, every concept has associations. I think that creativity lies exactly in following promising trains of association. The associations available to you for any given concept depend on your education. Not just your formal education, but your total experience of and learning in life. If you're not very educated, and if your mind tends toward the routine and prosaic, you won't be capable of coming up with creative ideas.

For example, take the idea of a banker. If you don't know much about bankers, don't know any of them personally, for example, and haven't learned anything about banking beyond your own consumer experiences, you won't be able to come up with many interesting associations. If you're trying to create a banker character, you will be limited to cliche notions, such as that bankers like money, enjoy power and prestige, and so on. Your banker won't be much more than the pinstriped mascot of the Monopoly board-game.

Linda Seger, in her excellent book Creating Unforgettable Characters, talks about using this process to sketch in the traits of a potential character. As an illustration, she suggests that you're creating a character for the next Indiana Jones movie--say a professor of religion. She then steps through a process of association to discover more about this character:

If this religion professor has a Ph.D., we would expect that he has done a great deal of research and can easily ferret out all types of obscure information in libraries or bookstores. It would be consistent for him to be interested in related areas, such as philosophy, church history, sociology, anthropology.

Many religion professors...have had liberal-arts backgrounds.... It wouldn't be inconsistent for a professor to love literature or music or art or architecture--or to be knowledgeable about these areas. This interest in archaeology and early church history could lead to a love of travel. Perhaps he might have done some archaeological research in Turkey, or Israel, or Egypt. It wouldn't be unusual for him to know several languages, perhaps Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

Notice how one set of characteristics implies other character qualities. A person who is sophisticated enough to know the music of Mendelssohn may also know the painting of Vermeer and Rembrandt. A person who grew up on a farm probably knows something about repairing tractors and cars, and about how to read weather patterns.

Linda Seger's professor of religion already starts to sound like a person, just by going through likely associations. (There's more to do, of course, to create an actual character.) If you were writing a story, any one of those connected traits might be a doorway to somewhere useful. If the character speaks Hebrew, maybe he's Jewish, and you have another field of associations. Or if he loves travel, maybe he flies his own plane--and voila, another set of possibilities. You move steadily in the direction of a more definite, unique individual--a character.

The connections are logical and probable, but not necessary: you choose the ones you want. The choices are guided by your intuition and the needs of your story.

It's work. It requires actual thinking: actively imagining things and working through the connections. It's rather like cooking: the creator works hard so that the consumer can have a relatively fast, pleasant experience.

Creating story events is similar. You imagine something happening, and then imagine how characters respond. If you're not sure, then you need to work more on the characters. Work, work, work.

That's what I did yesterday, and I inched forward once again.

have a plan

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with Mom--ham-and-cheese sandwiches at her dining-table while looking out at the milky-green water of Cove Cliff. We talk about many things: psychology, astrology, family, and of course writing (the supposed topic of the lunch symposium). Yesterday we touched on the topic of structure as an important part of creative writing.

We agree on its importance, but many people are skeptical. "Structure" sounds so dry, so...uncreative. Architects and engineers concern themselves with structure: they're making things that have to stand up in the physical world. But creative writers, channeling the Muse, spew free and original ideas on the page, going where their creative spirits take them, discovering images and writing them down...right?

Maybe for a very short piece such an approach could produce something readable. But a longer work, like a bridge or a convention center, has to stand up under its own strength. It's sustaining itself not against gravity and wind-shear, but against the wandering attention of the reader. Why should a reader stick with you?

In his Poetics, Aristotle determined that the most important element of a tragedy (the highest form of poetry, in his view) was plot, or "what happens". (More exactly, plot is "what happens" plus the arrangement or order of what happens.) It forms the structure of a story. Note that plotting has nothing directly to do with writing at all. You could devise a plot using pictures or some other symbolic system. Words are convenient for this, but not necessary.

Plotting is a selection and ordering of events. A good storyteller is someone who does this in a way that is compelling and that generates strong emotional responses in the audience. In theory it could be done entirely in one's head, without the use of words or any other symbols at all--just the arrangement of mental images, like a dream. Committing the story to words is a purely secondary task, as well as a secondary talent. As Robert McKee points out, many people have literary ability--the ability to write good prose. Few have story ability--the ability to imagine and arrange events in an interesting and meaningful way.

Speaking for myself, I find that my writing is easiest and best when I'm describing an event that has actually happened. When I write a scene that has happened in actual life (or in a dream), the characters, setting, and specific actions and dialogue are all taken care of. They've already happened, and I just need to select from among the details and choose how to describe them. There is much more in any real-life scene than could ever be described, so I have a cornucopia of choice. The choices I make put my stamp on the scene: I give it a particular meaning by choosing as I do.

In a simple real-life story, the relationship of the scenes to each other is also more or less a given. You start at the beginning and go on to the end. The structure and content of the scenes has been given you by life; now you really do just have to write it down.

But for fictional works, the writer has to come up with all the material that is supplied by life in the case of a nonfiction story. You have to think up the characters, the setting, and the specific actions and dialogue for each scene, as well as a sequence of scenes that lead to an interesting punch at the end. (In real life, this "interesting punch" already exists--and is presumably the reason you've chosen to tell the story in the first place.)

That's a lot of creative work--and it's creative work of different types.

For the past several months I've been reworking the detailed structure of my story. It's time-consuming and creatively difficult. But before my very eyes I see it leading to a better result. I'm organizing the content of a sequence of chapters, and doing this by way of bullet-points in Word. In the past I've used index cards for this purpose, but I'm experimenting with this even more convenient method (although I do miss the physicalness of the index cards, the heft of a growing deck of scenes that are gradually cohering into a story). I scan down my growing list of bullets, playing out scenes or steps in my mind, like a movie. When I hit a gap, or a step that doesn't feel like a strong, logical result of the previous step, I go back to my notes and start imagining.

"How would this character respond?" I ask myself. Well, that depends--what exactly is this character trying to achieve here? And why? The questions open up backward into the motivational world behind the story. They force me to examine the inner workings of my story-world, to confront the areas that are as yet unimagined, uncreated.

The goal is to create a fictional world that feels as close as possible to my real world: a place in which actual events in an actual world already exist, and my task as a writer is simply to find the words to describe them. In my experience this makes a story much more fun both to write and to read. I'm not fussing around trying to figure out how to describe a guy's fedora at the same time I'm trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. If you really figure out who he is and what he wants, you might also discover whether he really even wears a fedora.

Robert McKee says it, J. K. Rowling says it to would-be writer kids, Strunk and White say it in The Elements of Style, and now Paul Vitols says it: before you write, have a plan. Diving in and hoping for the best means harder work and a poorer result.

And who needs that?

what to do when the Muse is busy elsewhere

I sit in a little pool of light in my dim office. The blinds are still closed to the deep-blue twilight outside. The dark is just now lifting, and there is 2° of frost out there.

I'm on track with my usual morning routine: I've read my way further into Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out, highlighter in hand (I'm now on page 463--about 1/3 of the way through), trying the techniques as I go. I've keyed notes from The Roman Conquest of Italy and from The Pagan God. I've finished both mugs of coffee, and now it's blog-post time.

This orderly, routine approach is, for me, essential if I want to get anywhere (although you could make a reasonably strong case that I'm not getting anywhere...). I have no kinship at all with those "inspired", chaotic artists who work in crazed, sometimes drug-suffused, bursts of activity. I believe Thomas Wolfe was one such; certainly his writer-protagonist Monk in You Can't Go Home Again was. He would write in an ecstasy or frenzy for 24 hours or more at a stretch, and eventually collapse from exhaustion. Wolfe must have known this type of approach in order to write about it.

Or D M Thomas, when he wrote The White Hotel: he too wrote in a kind of trance for 12 or 16 hours a day, finishing the first draft with lightning speed. It just came to him.

Of course Hunter S. Thompson was famous for writing (and living) while wasted on every type of drug procurable. Many novelists are alcoholics, and many of those write while drunk.

Unthinkable for me. The first sip of alcohol is itself the end of my productive day. (Well, almost--I do finish my afternoon reading period while drinking my first glass of wine.) It lets in the clutch of my mind and I go out of gear. I'm not good for any more mental load-pulling; only for light social conversation. If I had to produce something coherent while intoxicated, I'd be in deep trouble.

My approach is orderly and workmanlike. I enjoy wrestling with details of administration--how to set up filing systems, working out the naming conventions for documents, and so on. These things can make me feel busy and productive, and thus boost my confidence. And I find that when I am dispirited and afraid of my task (as I am now), these simple tasks and my structured approach help to see me through. I'm not a living skeleton lying on a dry plain, croaking for a Muse who never arrives; I'm more like the same living skeleton trudging forward, staff in hand, at a slow, measured pace. I may well keel over long before reaching my goal, to be covered with sand and forgotten like the Muse-supplicator, but at least I died while in progress.

book as cornucopia

Yesterday I pressed forward in my morning writing session, typing more into the document I call "Draft 2 Notes". I've decided to move my note-making to this document, since my thoughts are ranging over the whole range of my story, and, for one thing, I want to be able to find these ideas later when I go looking for them. If they're all buried in the notes for one of my chapters (30 currently), I might not.

It was tougher going. I'm investigating the ancient idea of the Twelve Tribes of Israel as it may have been used by the Essenes in their community. I feel a bit frustrated, since I seem to be retracing the same ground over and over, crisscrossing over my own tracks, like Pooh and Piglet in search of the elusive woozle. But I know the feeling when I "get" something: there is a click of insight, and I know I've got it. Until I get there, I have to keep fiddling with it. Another analogy: working at a large jigsaw puzzle, and repeatedly trying pieces in one spot. Inadvertently, you try the same ones over and over again, in and among a few new ones.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy this process. My fear is that I enjoy it too much. I might rest in a place of happily footling with bits of historical information, forging connections, finding symbolic links--and never move on to actual writing. Very little of this material will wind up in the finished piece--there's just too much of it. But, as I've said before, having so much groundwork under it will lend that all-important quality of richness: the feeling that the writer has selected details from a superabundance of possibilities, rather than laid out everything he's got.

The image just popped into my mind of visiting, with my granddad Alexander in March 1982, a "supermarket" in Soviet-era Riga. Even in that relatively well-off "republic", the shelves were meagerly stocked: a few root vegetables, some canned goods. It was a depressing sight.

"When we hear there is going to be toilet paper," he said in his very good English, taken up only when he retired, "people come rushing--with broom handles, or pieces of rope, to put the toilet-paper on."

"Stringing it on like beads?" I said.

"Yes!"

Well, I don't want my story to be any Soviet supermarket. Neither do I want it to be like my own Save-On Foods, however: a palace of packaged goods, with a few unpackaged things ranged around the periphery. No, how about the central market in Barcelona, as I remember it from 1979, when Tim and I were driving through Europe. It was the biggest and most impressive of all the many markets we visited on our travels: a maze of tables banked with fresh produce of every kind. I remember masses of fresh fish of many species laid on beds of ice, their scales scintillating under the bright lamps that hung over the stall. All the fresh, tender pork chops, sausages, green-leafed vegetables, bread. We wandered through it hungrily. What to choose?

Yes: let my book be like the Barcelona public market! Vast, fresh, wholesome, delicious.

what to write about?

Yesterday I talked about the problem of whether one knows enough about how to write as a possible barrier to progressing with the work: the "technical barrier".

Another barrier is what I suggested might be called the "subject barrier": whether one knows enough about what to write--one's subject. Do I know enough about what I'm trying to talk about?

Even before that is the related problem of what to write about in the first place. What is my subject? This, for me, has been an especially difficult one.

Throughout my life I recall having critical and judgmental thoughts about people who say things like, "I want to be a writer, but I don't know what to write about." I would think. What makes you think you want to be a writer, then? Maybe Wal-Mart greeter is more your speed.

Not coincidentally, that very description fit myself. I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write about. I'm still that way. Very gradually, over the course of years, I found the subject-matter for this work, The Mission, and decided to go ahead and start creating it. I knew it would take me years, but felt that was fair enough, since it had taken me years just to arrive at the project, to choose it.

Before this, there have been many other projects: some complete, but many more incomplete. Aside from The Odyssey, which did see the light of day and make it onto the air, I would say that they were all more or less the wrong thing. What do I mean by "wrong"? Ultimately, I think, a mismatch between the subject and my true self, my true being.

How do you tell whether what you're doing is consonant with your true being? I'm not sure. Spontaneous passion is one clue: do you feel a real, emotional charge from the idea? Or is your enthusiasm really coming from some other source, such as the belief that you can have a hit, or that you're going along with some desirable crowd? Fashion is a powerful motivator. When I worked as a clerk at North Shore West Claim Centre in 1996, some of the estimators talked enthusiastically about their new cigar humidors--there was a buzz around cigars and how to appreciate them properly. Cigars were fashionable--they were appearing on the covers of magazines. How many cigars are those guys smoking now? What are they doing with their humidors? Much of fame and fortune is related to fashion, but, speaking for myself, I'm much too slow-moving to be able to respond to fashion effectively, and, more importantly, fashion is too shallow a motivator for anything that could be called art.

Only your intuition can tell you whether you're really on the beam of your true self. Intuition is sure, but quiet--easily drowned out by other inputs unless you tune in to it. It's that knowing voice within--the one that we wish we'd listened to when we later get into trouble by not following it. I'm slowly learning to listen to mine. Very slowly, it sometimes seems.

A person truly in tune with his or her intuition is not seduced by externals: fame, fortune, fashion, peer acceptance. These things provide external reassurances that we're ok, we're doing the right thing.

But for an artist, these things are inauthentic (they're inauthentic for everyone, in my opinion). In the long run, our success in life cannot be measured by how well we conform, certainly not in an individualistic part of the world such as the West. We should conform only as much as is necessary to provide us with the freedom to be ourselves.

All right: so finding the subject of one's work is an intuitive matter. There's no quick way of finding it except by exercising our intuition. Then there is the next phase of knowledge of subject: knowing enough about the subject to write about it.

But that's another topic...